South

Rubber rose, garden hose.

Insufferable heat, and no shade at the top of the wheel. Summer, noon, and meadow clippings held fast to skin by rain, or by sweat.

Bulgarian rose sits at the centre and it is not a pretty one. Peach and raspberry press sugar into it until it turns almost overripe. Mountain pennyroyal and thyme come through dry off the hillside and cut that back, and coriander keeps a green edge on it. Everything underneath is animal. Castoreum and oakmoss go feral, opoponax and benzoin turn resinous, and vetiver reads like the hose itself, hot rubber and standing water.

Kylie White is a sculptor in San Francisco, working in metal and stone for their density and the edge that density lets them hold. Beneath the polished surface of a piece there is a roiling, boiling interior made of every decision that came before it. The space between where one thing ends and another begins is a matter of scale, an edge defined with advancing precision. A formula is a document under relentless calibration.

The project is twelve fragrances marking the wheel of time, released across three collections. Time is the one dimension sculpture will not give, and a bottle of compressed clouds will. Some raw materials are grown or foraged to hold the terroir of when and where they were made, with classic molecular workhorses carrying the structure, and everything is formulated, blended and bottled in-house. Each bottle of a given release is one of one hundred and twenty.